Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, a
small village in the Basque region of France, separated from the
city of Saint-Jean-de-Luz by the Nivelle River. The first thirty-five
years of the life of his mother, Marie Delouart, are a near-total
blank. She was apparently born in the Basque region and spent
some time in Spain, where she met Ravel's father. Biographers
found that locals of Saint-Jean-de-Luz did nor recall her being
born there, and Manuel de Falla praised her knowledge of Spanish,
which indicates that he did not take her to be a natural
speaker of the language. But she would sing Spanish folk songs to
Maurice, and these were a later inspiration for his work.

Basque and Spanish women usually married young, but Marie
apparently did not. A romanticizing biographer, Victor Seroff,
suggested that Marie might have had children before she met
and married Joseph Ravel, or a secret life as a "gypsy or even a
smuggler": "A woman who wanted to hurt the composer," he
says, "once told him his mother's true age. Ravel was so horrified
that for a long time he could not get over it." And when Seroff
asked Ravel's brother, Edouard, for information about his mother's
early years, Edouard said that he "saw no reason why [Seroff]
should talk about their mother in a book about his brother." In
any case, Ravel's mother was a violent agnostic, atypical of her
time and place. As a widow, she was urged by a woman friend in
Saint-Jean-de-Luz to come to church and pray; Marie said that
she'd rather "be in hell with her family than in heaven all alone."

When Ravel enlisted in the army during World War I, he described
his mother as a "monster" who wanted to hold onto her
sons and not let them enlist to fight for their country. But, he added,
she was a "monster" he loved. In spite of, or perhaps because of,
her blasphemies and obscure past, Ravel was a confirmed mama's
boy. The pianist Robert Casadesus recalled that his first sight of
Ravel, in the early years of the century, was at a concert, tenderly
holding the arm of his aged mother, helping her to her seat.

French biographers commonly assert that the fathers of great
men were also great. Maurice Ravel's father, Joseph, was affectionate,
with a highly developed love for music and culture, and
he did not object when his son embraced an artistic career,
despite the family's lack of money. Joseph Ravel was not quite the
inventing genius he has been portrayed as. He tinkered with
inventions in the pioneer days of automobile construction, but
his most notable project was also his biggest failure. "The Whirlwind
of Death," a loop-the-loop designed for circuses and auto
shows in 1906-07, was displayed at Barnum and Bailey's Circus,
but it flopped either because of a fatal accident, as one story has
it, or because its wooden framework was destroyed in a hurricane
in Iowa in September 1907.

Joseph was born in Switzerland, and earlier branches of the
family bear variants of the name on public records: But for the
chance slip of a Swiss notary's pen, we might be speaking today
of Boléro by Ravet or Ravex. A fantastic etymology of Ravel as a
so-called Jewish name deriving from Rabbele [sic] was apparently
invented by Roland-Manuel as a joke and was long afterward
repeated by gullible biographers. In 1873 Joseph Ravel
went to Spain as a civil engineer for a railway-construction job in
the New Castille province, and there he met and married the
composer's mother. After Maurice was born, another son was
added to complete the family in 1879; the rather faceless Edouard
was the composer's only brother. By then the family had moved
to Paris, where Joseph was, as ever, seeking his fortune in industrial
schemes.

The Ravel family moved frequently around Paris, trying out
humble, if strenuous, business affairs. Workaholism ran in the
family: After the deaths of his parents, Edouard Ravel moved
into the home of his employers at a small auto-parts factory, Mr.
Bonnet, and his wife. Edouard was traumatized in body and
spirit by army service during World War I that turned his hair
white. In later photos he looks flabby and passive, a sedentary
man who adulated others, rather like Picasso's friend Jaime
Sabartés. Even in adulthood, Maurice called his brother by
the infantile nickname Douardouard. Ravel was known in his
own circle as Rara, and the composer's friends believed that
Douardouard's personality had been effaced by Rara's fame.

Regional guides claim Ravel as a Basque composer, and he
would frequently return to his birthplace in later life. The seven
provinces of the region are shared between France and Spain
(three in France and four in Spain), and Ravel was attached to his
native land, with its majestic mountain scenery and wiry, tough
peasants. The Basque region is known for the sport of pelota,
bullfighting, and a tradition of witchcraft and demonology. In
1608 Pierre de Lancre, a judge from Bordeaux, was named by
Henri IV to investigate the troubling abundance of witches that
"contaminated" the Basque country. De Lancre's report revealed
that sorceries were one way of expressing forbidden sexuality:
the devil, when having sex with boys or girls, "took as much
pleasure in sodomy as in the most ordered and natural voluptuousness."
Male witnesses admitted performing sodomy "to
please the devil," often with male relatives, one Basque man saying
he did so "often in a passive way with [the Devil], often
actively with other warlocks." Judges decided that the Basque
witnesses did not really believe in the devil, but simply desired to
commit adultery and sodomy, "and so they gathered, and the
naughtiest one among them pretended to be Satan."

Ravel was very Basque in his use of sorcery as sexual camouflage,
returning obsessively to the theme of witchcraft as a source
of inspiration. In public and even among most of his friends,
Ravel suppressed his sexual desires and used witchcraft as his forefathers
had, as an emotional safety valve and a way of expressing
forbidden feelings. So long as his parents lived, according to
friends who were aware of Ravel's homosexuality, he could not
permit himself to express his true nature.

In Paris, the engineer Joseph Ravel enjoyed taking his sons on
tours of factories, where they all admired machinery. Despite the
family's money worries, Maurice had piano lessons at age seven,
from Henry Ghys, a musician whose short-lived notoriety was
based on the song Air Louis XIII. The boy also had lessons in
harmony, counterpoint, and composition from Charles-René, a
student of the composer Léo Delibes (who wrote the ballets
Sylvia and Coppélia). Later, one of Ravel's great qualities as a
composer was to produce finished works, which seem to have
emerged whole from his brain. This early training in the basics of
composition, at the same time as he was learning the piano, no
doubt helped to develop the creative mechanism. Among his
early exercises, Ravel was made to write variations on a chorale
by Schumann and a theme from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt. Arbie
Orenstein finds that these early efforts display "some awkward
writing for the keyboard" but also have "a gentle, spontaneous
lyricism."

Maurice's progress as a piano pupil must have been rapid, as
he soon changed professors, moving up to the more distinguished
Emile Descombes, who taught such young virtuosos as Alfred
Cortot and the composer Reynaldo Hahn. When he was twelve
years old, Maurice met another youngster who would be a close
friend, the pianist Ricardo Viñes. Later described by Francis
Poulenc as a "strange hidalgo," Viñes was a brilliant keyboard
artist, much interested in romantic literature; he lent Maurice
books like Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit. Viñes described
the young Ravel as looking "like a Florentine page,
standing straight and stiff, with bangs and flowing black hair....
His delicate Basque face with its pure profile was graceful and
thin atop his slender neck and narrow shoulders."

Ravel and Viñes spent hours leaning over the balcony of the
Ravel family apartment on the rue Pigalle, overlooking a café
where artists would gather and models would flirt with them.
The boys tried to guess which model would wind up with which
artist, and this early sexual sophistication belies the impression
given in some biographies that Ravel was a lifelong innocent.
Leaning over a balcony voyeuristically would become a typical
Ravel pose, and a number of photos show the adult composer
watching what is going on below, while keeping his distance from
the action.

A portrait of Maurice from this time shows curly hair and
large liquid eyes that might seem exaggerated if we did not know
from photos that his eyes were indeed that liquidly expressive.
Maurice was clearly considered the beauty of the family, taking
after his mother; a portrait of Edouard, made about this time,
shows a stolid, potato-faced youngster. Ravel's satisfaction in his
own appearance would develop into time-consuming narcissism.

In 1889 a group of Emile Descombes's pupils, including Cortot,
Hahn, and Ravel gave a public performance; Maurice played
an excerpt from the Piano Concerto no. 3 by Ignaz Moscheles, a
virtuoso pianist and friend of Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote
eight piano concertos, of which the third, written in 1820, was
the most popular for its early Romantic, pre-Chopin style. Ravel
always referred to 1820 as his ideal historical period, and he
would later own an Erard piano made in that year, with a dry,
hard tone that doubtless influenced the works he wrote on it.

In 1889 Paris was astonished by the Eiffel Tower, built for the
Exposition Universelle, the World's Fair that included among its
attractions Rimsky-Korsakov conducting his own works, gamelan
orchestras, gypsy bands, and music groups from Russia,
Sudan, Serbia, and Romania. The exposition meant to show that
although Europe was embroiled in an arms race, science was not
only for destruction, and war "not the highest purpose of human
society." The Champs de Mars below the Eiffel Tower was filled
with industrial exhibits, like the Galérie des machines, which
must have fascinated the Ravel boys. Displays offered views of
distant lands and peoples, and on the Esplanade des Invalides,
natives from a so-called Aissaova tribe entertained passersby by
sticking their hands into flames, and piercing their tongues, eye
sockets, and abdomens with spikes.

Amid such thrills, the fourteen-year-old Ravel auditioned for
the Paris Conservatoire, playing the piano for faculty including
the head of the institution, Ambroise Thomas, the composer of the
operas, Mignon and Hamlet. Although Ravel was accepted as a
pupil and recognized as a gifted pianist, it was noted that he came
late to class and was often distracted. He competed three times
for prizes in harmony and piano but did not win. However, he
enjoyed socializing with Viñes, playing four-handed piano works,
and discussing favorite books. He was intrigued with Symbolist
aesthetics early on, and the books he read remained important
influences for the rest of his life. Ravel was secretly bookish, hiding
what he read from most friends. His favorites included Villiers
de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Du dandysme
et de George Brummel, and Les Diaboliques, J. K. Huysmans's A
rebours, and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe as translated by
Charles Baudelaire.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future, from 1886, is set in the
laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey,
where the inventor laments that his phonograph arrived too late
to capture history's key moments. Edison builds a female robot,
Hadaly, from wires with "two phonographs of gold" for lungs,
and a cylinder on which her gestures are recorded. Ever fascinated
with machines, Ravel later toyed with setting E.T.A. Hoffmann's
story of the mechanical doll Olympia.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, another of Ravel's favorite authors, lived
with the writer Jean Lorrain, who was called "Jehanne la bonne
Lorraine," a jokingly camp reference to Joan of Arc. Both liked
to wear makeup and elaborate costumes, with Lorrain piling on
the jewelry, tinting his moustache with henna and gold powder,
and signing newspaper articles "Mimosa" and "Stendhaletta." In
A un diner d'athées, a novella from Barbey's collection Les Diaboliques,
a sadist named Major Ydow, who looks like an emerald-eyed
bust of Antinous, the Emperor Hadrian's companion, seals
up his lover Rosalba's sexual organs with boiling wax. In another,
"La Vengeance d'une femme," a duchess-turned-prostitute plies
her trade in Ravel's home area of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, which must
have given the boy a thrill. Du Dandysme et de George Brummel
made an even greater impression on the young Maurice, who
began to look and act like a dandy, as that breed was defined by
Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Barbey d'Aurevilly himself. Since
almost every reminiscence of Ravel would cite his dandylike
appearance, it is important to explore the sources for this consciously
fabricated personality which lasted his whole life.

In Barbey's essay on Brummel, the dandy's features are described:
glacial wit; the appearance of total self-control; sober and rigid elegance;
an ability to wound others with words and ignore his victims'
discomfort. Ravel would later conform to this behavior in
social situations, inspired by eighteenth-century British dandies
like Brummel or Horace Walpole.

Ravel drew some elements of his persona as dandy from the
works of Edgar Allan Poe, as translated by Baudelaire. Jean-Paul
Sartre suggested that Baudelaire's myth of the dandy conceals not
homosexuality, but exhibitionism. Yet Oscar Wilde and other gay
writers advanced a tradition of the androgynous dandy. The essayist
Jules Lemaître noted, "The dandy has something against nature,
something androgynous with which he can endlessly seduce."

Huysmans called another of Ravel's favorite books, the novel
A rebours, "vaguely clerical, a bit pederastic," and its chief character,
des Esseintes, a "Christian and pederast, impotent man and
unbeliever." The effeminate des Esseintes provided a role model
to a generation of aesthetes and dandies who, like him, retired to
their neurotic collections of books and artworks. Viñes once
referred to Ravel's "mixture of medieval Catholicism and satanic
impiety," which is closer to a description of des Esseintes than to
the agnostic Ravel.

To young Maurice, Poe was a double influence, not just as a
dandy but also as a creative theorist. He cited Poe's essay, "The
Philosophy of Composition," as the most important lesson he
ever received about composing. In it, Poe stated, "Every plot,
worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything
be attempted with the pen." This became Ravel's approach
to composition, thinking everything out in his head before setting
pen to paper. It presumed an intense mental effort and constant
pressure, conscious and unconscious, during the creative act. Poe
described his writing of "The Raven" step by step "with the precision
and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem." Ravel
liked to tell students, "I do logarithms," to arrive at compositional
solutions. Both Poe and Ravel assumed this pseudoscientific
posture as a way of disciplining creative frenzy that they
feared otherwise might go uncontrolled; the need for discipline in
creativity obsessed both men.

They also agreed about the ideal length of creative works. In
an essay Ravel treasured, "The Poetic Principle," Poe maintained
that a poem can only sustain its excitement for a half-hour, "at
the very utmost." With few exceptions, this was also the time-limit
of Ravel's compositions, if only to make it possible for him
to hold an entire work in his head before setting it down on
paper. Poe stressed that beauty was more important in poetry
than truth, which was better suited to prose. Ravel would often
insist that in any artwork, beauty was paramount.

While mulling over such artistic questions, he continued his
studies. In February 1893, while he was still at the Conservatoire,
Ravel went with Viñes to pay homage to a musical hero,
Emmanuel Chabrier. The two teenagers were cordially received,
and Chabrier listened carefully to their playing of his Trois valses
romantiques, but interrupted them so often with conflicting and
varied criticisms that they left his home "completely bewildered."
Chabrier noted in his address book: "Ravel (M. Maurice)
pianist, 73 rue Pigalle," but a week later he had an attack of
paralysis that prevented further contacts. Later, Ravel would also
perplex students who came to play his works with unexpected
opinions and advice. At about the same time, Maurice met Erik
Satie through his father, who knew the Montmartre composer,
then eking out a living as pianist at the Café de la Nouvelle
Athènes. Satie gravely consulted with Ravel and Viñes about his
plan to set newspaper advertisements to music, writing miniscule
orchestrations to texts from the want ads.

In 1893 Ravel wrote the piano piece Sérénade grotesque, much
influenced by Chabrier, and the song Ballade de la Reine morte
d'aimer in the Satie vein. Sérénade grotesque, marked "very
pizzicato," was the first of Ravel's portraits of a grotesque, tragicomic
persona fitting awkwardly into the role of lover. The Ballade
de la Reine morte d'aimer, set to a poem by the Belgian
writer Roland de Marès (1874-1955), was a mournful ditty, with
its "little bells of Thulé" that play a "supreme Hosanna" for a
Bohemian queen.

The following spring, Ravel met the composer Edvard Grieg at
the Montparnasse apartment of friends, where Ravel played
Grieg's Norwegian Dances on the piano. Grieg stopped him, saying,
"No, young man, not like that at all.... It's a peasant
dance." Ravel started to play again and Grieg leaped around the
room in an authentic peasant dance, creating a memorable scene
of an elfin pianist and a tiny troll dancer.

In August 1895, Ravel returned to composition with a setting
of "Un grand sommeil noir," a poem by Paul Verlaine, which
remained unpublished during the composer's lifetime. He set only
two poems by Verlaine, who was much more the poet of Debussy
and Fauré, and Un grand sommeil noir starts off in a sunless
Mussorgsky mood, describing in bass notes how a "vast dark
sleep falls on my life." Ravel's first significant piano work, the
Habanera for two pianos, was finished in November 1895 and
later given orchestral form as the third movement of Rapsodie
espagnole. In the same month, Ravel wrote his first published work,
Menuet antique. The title is a paradox, uniting an eighteenth-century
dance to an ancient Greek sensibility. The Menuet antique
is saucy, like a naughty Fragonard painting, rococco yet with
earthy passion. A pounding, pulsing rhythm of Pan's dance is
given to harmonies that sound tantalizingly like those of Bach's
Chaconne.

The lore of Pan permeated Ravel's work from this early
Menuet antique through Daphnis et Chloé and beyond. The published
musical score of Menuet antique showed an image of a bare-chested
Pan playing his pipes. Ancient Greek imagery in art
represented for the generation of Decadents a revival of the Arcadian
tradition, including sexual freedom. In Arcadia, Pan expressed
violent sexuality through music. The ancient Greeks used the
expression "to honor Pan" to mean male homosexual activity,
and Panic love, like Panic fear, was violent, sudden, and unforeseen.
Dance and music were essential occupations of this animalistic
leaper, deformed and unhappy in love, whose music could be
irresistibly charming. Panic fear was often present in armies during
wartime, and all-night initiatory festivals of Pan were marked
by special cries and music to exorcise fears and phantoms.
Deeply imbued with this mythological lore, Ravel's works often
embody the Panic ideal.

Ravel finished two more songs in December 1896: "Sainte,"
set to a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, and D'Anne jouant de
l'espinette, to words by Clément Marot. Sainte, which was
published only in 1907, is like a soft-toned Puvis de Chavannes
portrait of a woman saint. The writer Vladimir Jankélévitch saw
Sainte as evidence of Ravel's "esoteric" period, influenced by
Satie's Rosicrucian music. Sainte is atypically simple and direct
and may have been intended as an homage to his mother as
domestic saint, a "female musician of silence" as he called her.
Ravel often stated how vital was his mother's quietly loving presence,
calling her his "only reason for living." The song sounds
unusually sincere, given that Ravel was already formulating his
self-image as insincere dandy.

The two works written in 1897, Sonate pour Violon et Piano
in one movement, and Entre cloches, for two pianos, show the
influence of Gabriel Fauré and César Franck. Entre Cloches was
joined to Habanera to make up the two-movement Sites auriculaires.
Meaning literally "places which can be sensed by the ear,"
the title sounds medical, echoing Satie's parodic titles. Ravel
enjoyed surgical-sounding expressions, especially if they also had
a potentially erotic ring; eating cherries one day, he told the
pianist Gaby Casadesus they were a "buccal pleasure." The
Habanera begins tentatively, as if timidly knocking on the door.
There is a comic disjunction between the proud Spanish themes
and the mock-shy way they are treated, rhythmic passages presented
with hesitation, as if they needed to be obstinately learned.
This approach, akin to the humor of Chabrier and Satie, is at several
ironic removes from Spain.

The Sonate pour Violin et Piano in one movement is about
fourteen minutes long, written in the style of the Franck. Ravel
had not yet developed the theory that the piano and violin were
"essentially incompatible," and the early sonata is full-hearted,
lush music on exalted heights of emotion.

In autumn 1897, Ravel was offered a job teaching music in
Tunisia, which he turned down in order to stay close to his family
and friends. Not going to North Africa meant opportunities
missed for personal development and for a full investigation of
Arab themes. Ravel's fascination with such subjects was always
at a remove. Undiluted experience with the Arab world might not
have offered him the artificiality he craved.

One danger of real contacts with North Africa was illustrated
by Camille Saint-Saëns, Fauré's teacher, who was plagued by
blackmailing letters from North African men he paid, apparently
too little, for sex. Saint-Saëns received a series of such letters, like
one in 1893 from a young Algierian named Victor Dumesnil:
"Maybe there are pederasts of your kind in Paris whom you support
with bits of bread, but it won't be the same with me....
You're a liar, a thief, and a pederast." Ravel would avoid this
kind of experience, common at the time.

Meanwhile, a faculty shake-up at the Conservatoire had resulted
in the resignation of Jules Massenet as professor of composition,
and the hiring of Gabriel Fauré to fill his place. At the time, Fauré
was still considered a radical, whose works were of spiky difficulty
to traditionalists. Still tinkering at his Requiem, which he wrote
"for pleasure," Fauré was an open-minded and warm teacher.
Very much of his time, Fauré still managed to keep a certain independence
that would prove a good model for his most famous
pupil. Although he admired Wagner and made a pilgrimage to
Bayreuth, Fauré allowed no audible influences from the German
composer to enter his music. At the turn of the century, Fauré
remained stubbornly devoted to writing intimate chamber works,
even when most of his contemporaries sought larger-scale canvases
for self-expression. Never abandoning the quality of tender
intimacy, Fauré's works remain among the most endearing of
modern French music, and Ravel would certainly learn from this
example. Yet some of Fauré's later works, particularly the ones
for piano solo, retain a mystical quality that transcends mere
Gallic charm. Ravel was happy to join Fauré's class in 1898, and
in a typical anecdote that he enjoyed repeating, Fauré at first
rejected one of his works, then asked Ravel to bring the work to
class again. When he asked why, the teacher's answer came: "I
might have been wrong." Fauré's pupils included Georges
Enesco, Charles Koechlin, and Raoul Laparra, and Ravel would
dedicate to Fauré such later works as Jeux d'eau and his string
quartet. Even after Ravel was definitively excluded from the list
of students at the Conservatoire in 1900, he continued to audit
Fauré's class until 1903. He also carried on his private lessons in
counterpoint and orchestration with André Gédalge, who taught
fugue as well, counting among his students Arthur Honegger,
Darius Milhaud, and Florent Schmitt. Ravel later wrote that
Gédalge was the first to make him realize the importance of structure
in composition, and of technique, not just as a "scholastic
abstraction." With an unusually clear teaching method, Gédalge
focused mainly on the works of Bach and Mozart, at a time when
this was uncommon.

In his first year under the new regime at the Conservatoire,
Ravel wrote two songs, Chanson du rouet, to a poem by Leconte
de Lisle, and Si morne, after Emile Verhaeren. Chanson du rouet
[Spinning song] is in the tradition of Saint-Saëns's Rouet d'Omphale
and Schubert's Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, but it is
hampered by a weak text. Si Morne is heavy with Symbolist
depression, describing a "mouth acrid with molds ... Rotting,
hugely swaddled in ennui." Ravel set this text with urgency, perhaps
as an expression of his stiflingly overprotected home life.

The same year, 1898, saw his first work written for full orchestra,
the overture, Shéhérazade. The 1001 Nights provided for the
composer an atmosphere of Eastern sexual liberation, among
other things. A number of stories in the collection joke about
homosexuality, particularly the comic pederast Abu Nuwas, also
one of the great Arab poets, while other characters like to "eat
both figs and pomegranates," a metaphor for bisexuality. Gérard
Pirlot has written about Sheherazade's essential "perversity,"
using words to achieve unconscious occult powers at night. Talking
all night, Sheherezade saved herself and a king who was
wounded by a wife's infidelity with a "well-hung black slave more
viril than he," Pirlot explains, "on whom he projects fantasies of
passive homosexuality." As for Ravel, he would tell friends, "I only
begin to live at night," and as a nocturnal creature, he used music for
some of the magical purposes Sheherezade aimed at with words.

Whatever his desires for liberation, at the Conservatoire Ravel
was an exuberant joker. He would breeze into the classroom in
the teacher's absence and strike up a parody on the piano, setting
the words from the aria "Pourquoi me reveiller?" from Massenet's
Werther to the tune of "Tarara boom-de-ay!," a turn-of-the-century
hit. "Tarara boom-de-ay!" had a naughty reputation, sung
at cabarets where girls tossed up their skirts, and Rara was a fan
of this song, which contained his nickname in its title.

On March 5, 1898, Ravel had his public début as a composer
with a performance of Sites Auriculaires at a concert sponsored
by the Société Nationale de Musique. Reading from the score, the
performers Viñes and Marthe Dron came to grief during the technically
challenging Entre cloches section. Another significant premiere
followed in April, when Viñes played the Menuet antique in
a recital of new music. Fauré occasionally took his students along
to posh salons, like that of Madame René de Saint-Marceaux,
where Debussy, André Messager, and Vincent d'Indy were also
present. Madame de Saint-Marceaux mused over the impassive
Ravel in her diary: "Is he pleased to hear his music? You cannot
tell. What an odd fellow." Ravel was once obliged to improvise at
the piano when the American dancer Isadora Duncan performed,
an experience he did not enjoy. In August 1898, Ravel wrote to
Madame de Saint-Marceaux, referring to himself as a "musical
Alcibiades." The French historian Henry Houssaye described
Alcibiades as a lovely young man surrounded by perverse male
friends who wanted to have sex with him, but he only accepted love
from one man, Socrates. Ravel, in referring to himself as Alcibiades,
or "Alkibiade," as he spelled it, did not specify who his
Socrates was. But his favorite Du Dandysme et de George Brummel
stated that dandies were "Androgynes of history, no longer
of Fable, among whom Alcibiades was the most beautiful."